Special Guest: Professor Abigail Rokison-Woodall – Speaking Shakespeare
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In this special episode, Abigail Rokison-Woodall, Deputy Director (Education) and Associate Professor in Shakespeare and Theatre at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK, talks to Sebastian Michael about the challenges – and joys – of speaking verse in general and Shakespearean verse in particular: how do we do his language justice in a contemporary performance setting and how do we deal with the ways in which the English Renaissance approach to language differs from ours, with a focus also, of course, on the significance this has for reading and reciting the Sonnets.
SEBASTIAN MICHAEL:
Today it is my great pleasure and honour and privilege indeed to welcome our special guest, Professor Abigail Rokison-Woodall, to talk to us about Speaking Shakespeare. Professor Rokison-Woodall began her career as a professional actor, her acting work including numerous roles in theatre and, amongst other television roles, Primrose Larkin in Darling Buds of May. Following a degree with the Open University undertaken whilst acting, she went on to take an MA in Shakespeare: Text and Playhouse at The Globe Theatre, King's College London. She completed her PhD in Shakespearean Verse Speaking in the English faculty at Cambridge University in 2006, after which she became a lecturer in Drama and English in the Education Faculty in Cambridge and Director of Studies in English and Drama at Homerton College, Cambridge. She joined the Shakespeare Institute in January 2013. Professor Rokison-Woodall was on the board of the British Shakespeare Association from 2002 till 2010, and chair from 2008 until 2010. Her first monograph, Shakespearean Verse Speaking, was published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in January 2010, and in July 2012 won the Shakespeare's Globe First Book Award, as a result of which she was invited to give public lectures at Shakespeare's Globe, Cheltenham Literary Festival, and the Shakespeare Institute. Following these lectures, Shakespeare's Globe and the Shakespeare Institute collaborated on a series of verse speaking symposia entitled The End of Shakespeare's Verse, in which she and Giles Block presented their ideas about verse speaking in venues in Staunton, Virginia; New York; Stratford, Ontario; Stratford-upon-Avon; and at Shakespeare's Globe in London. She completed a second monograph, Shakespeare for Young People: Productions, Versions and Adaptations for Bloomsbury Arden in 2013; a third, Shakespeare in the Theatre: Nicholas Hytner for Bloomsbury Arden in 2017, and As You Like It: Language and Writing for Bloomsbury Arden in 2021. She has recently co-written Shakespeare and Lecoq – A Practical Guide with Ed Woodall for Arden Bloomsbury, which is due to come out this year (2024). In 2017, she was appointed one of the general editors of the new Arden Shakespeare Performance Editions with Michael Dobson and Simon Russell Beale, and she has edited A Midsummer Night's Dream and Hamlet, and co-edited King Lear and Richard III with Simon Russell Beale for the series. She has contributed chapters to King's College, Cambridge, 1415 to 2015, published by Harvey Miller; Shakespeare Beyond English by CUP; Shakespeare in Stages also CUP; The Children's Literature Handbook by Routledge; The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare's Poetry, Oxford University Press; and The Great Shakespeareans: Gielgud, Olivier. Ashcroft, Dench, published by Bloomsbury Arden; and the supplementary material on Much Ado About Nothing for The Greenwood Companion to Shakespeare. She also has written a number of journal articles, including the only interview given by David Tennant on his performance as Hamlet, and in 2013 she edited a special edition of Shakespeare Journal for Routledge on Shakespeare and Authenticity. For the past few years, Professor Rokison-Woodall has been working with the RSC (Royal Shakespeare Company) on Signing Shakespeare, a project which has produced a series of resources and films for teaching Shakespeare's Macbeth to deaf children, now available on the RSC Learning Pages. July 2024 she co-directed a ‘total communication’ production which uses BSL (British Sign Language), SSE (Sign Supported English), and spoken word of the first act of The Tempest with students from Braidwood School for the Deaf at Birmingham Rep. She has recently directed Edward II and Massacre at Paris for The Marlowe Sessions, an immersive studio project by L6 L21 Productions, and also filmed a short documentary, Stratford's Forgotten Theatre, about the Stratford Roundhouse; and she is currently working on a documentary about Buzz Goodbody. Thank you very much, Abigail, for joining us here on Sonnetcast. Perhaps to start in the most broad, open fashion possible: as somebody who has examined this in great detail, who has studied, who has written and published on it, who is working on a daily basis with the challenges, what are the challenges of speaking verse in general and of speaking Shakespeare verse in particular? ABIGAIL ROKISON-WOODALL: I think there are a number of challenges. I mean, I think one of the challenges is that tension that exists in the contemporary theatre between wanting to speak Shakespeare's verse as well as possible, but also wanting to sound as natural as possible; wanting to inhabit characters in a way that probably wasn't the case in the Early Modern theatre. You know, it's a very kind of post-Stanislavskian approach that we have now to character. And so that tension between the verse and wanting to make it real, I think, is something that actors can struggle with quite a lot. The other thing is that in order to make his verse scan – and it's not just Shakespeare, but many of his contemporaries as well – they did things, they expanded words. So quite often we'll get an -ion ending that actually, if you really want to make the verse scan, you're going to have to say, you know, 'confu-she-on' instead of 'confusion'. And again, some contemporary actors are kind of uncomfortable with that. They think it's sort of a bit pretentious. We also get the notorious -ed endings, which sometimes want to be pronounced, like 'banishèd', and sometimes don’t, like 'banished'. And again, I think, I think actors can struggle with that. When we were producing the performance editions, I went and sat in on a reading – some quite experienced professional actors doing a reading of Romeo and Juliet – and I sat in partly to see what it was that people might be struggling with, and I'd sort of anticipated that people would simply miss the accented -ed endings and that it would make me go 'uuaaah!' because it sort of sends a jolt through me, because I think that kind of iambic pentameter feels quite heavily embedded, that meter, I think, in my being. But in fact, what they tended to do was pronounce every -ed ending, even when they didn't need to be pronounced for the sake of the meter, because in some way that was ‘Shakespearean’. So I think that's something. I also think that there's of course the fact that although Shakespeare is basically writing in iambic pentameter, he's constantly sticking in different metrical feet. So, you know, there's suddenly a trochee or there's a spondee or there's an anapest. And I think if actors don't recognise those metrical feet, it can completely throw them off. You know, if you don't realise that you've just got to an anapest and that you're not going ‘de-dum de-dum de-dum de-dum de-dum’, then of course, the whole line can get thrown off metrically. And I think the final thing is probably enjambment, and what to do about lines where the sense runs over the end of the verse line. I think that's another thing that is a real challenge for actors. And some actors want to follow the kind of Peter Hall school of thought that you should only pause or suspend at the end of a verse line, even if you haven't reached the end of a phrase, and that somehow that reveals something about the inner tempo of the character. And other people want to again try to make the thoughts flow and try to make it sound as natural as possible. And I personally think that probably you want to do something in the middle of that: that you want to explore why the enjambment is there and what it can do, and what the ending of the verse line can lend if you suspend it slightly, but you don't want to do that on every single line because it becomes tedious. So I think those are some of the biggest challenges, really. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Yes, this is something that I certainly encounter a lot in doing the sonnets. When I say ‘doing’, of course, I'm actually learning them all by heart, and so I speak them a lot, and then, of course, I recite them as part of the podcast. And there are cases when it's very easy to work with the meter and feel the meter. But there are some occasions when it's really quite painful, and then you have to make a conscious decision, whether you go for a contemporary pronunciation or whether you honour the Shakespearean way of writing it. Would you be able for us to go back about half a step to these two technical terms you used, anapest and enjambment? ABIGAIL ROKISON-WOODALL: Yes. Of course. So, when we're thinking about iambic pentameter, the word ‘iambic pentameter’ or the phrase ‘iambic pentameter’ is two words: the first one ‘iambic’, meaning that each foot is an iamb, which is a metrical foot which has a light or unstressed beat followed by a heavy or stressed beat. So ‘de-dum’ and we have five of them, hence iambic ‘pentameter’. So most of Shakespeare's verse is written in iambic pentameter. Some of Shakespeare's characters speak in different meters. So, for example, the witches in Macbeth speak in tetrameter. So a reversed foot; so heavy, then light, or stressed, followed by unstressed. And they only speak four metrical feet, so they speak trochaic tetrameter. So: “When shall we three meet again?” 'Dum-de dum-de dum-de dum'. An anapest is a foot which basically goes 'de-de dum'. So you've got two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable. I can't off the top of my head think of a really useful example. Oh, I suppose, actually, anapestic dimeter, two feet of anapests: “Over hill, over dale, | Thorough bush, thorough brier.” So ‘de-de dum, de-de dum, de-de dum, de-de dum’. And if you start going ‘Over hill, over…’ – if you were expecting it to be iambic pentameter, it would trip you up. So an anapest is ‘de-de dum’. But those come all over the place, lines of otherwise quite regular iambic pentameter will suddenly get an anapest. Often when characters have a lot to say, you know, they're trying to pack a lot of syllables in. Makes sense. But yes, they can trip you up if you're not expecting them. And yes, the other term I used was ‘enjambment’. That's when the sense runs over the end of the verse line. So in a lot of Shakespeare's early verse, and entirely in keeping with most verse of the 1580s/90s, the end of the verse line and the end of the phrase tend to coincide, and you would expect in a modern edition now to see punctuation coinciding with most of those line endings. Whereas when we get to Shakespeare's later plays there’s a lot more running over the end of the verse line. So: Since what I am to say must be but that [—] Which contradicts my accusation, and [—] The testimony on my part no other… [—] I’m pausing at the ends of those lines to show you where the verse lines end, but it's entirely ungrammatical. Some people think that you can make a virtue of it, so you can have Hermione saying, you know, 'Since what I am to say must be but that... — which contradicts my accusation and... — the testimony on my part...' So somebody who's kind of pulling the ideas into their head, who's breathless because she's just given birth, and that you can use those as kind of tools of characterisation. Other people would rather that you did: 'Since what I am to say must be but that which contradicts my accusation, and the testimony on my part no other…' and actually make it sound much more fluid. And so that's really what we're talking about when we're talking about 'enjambment'. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Yes, this comes up in the sonnets as well. Not often, but it does. It comes up in the sonnet that I will be recording this afternoon or tomorrow where he goes – it’s 93, it's the continuation of 92 – and he starts by saying, So shall I live supposing thou art true Like a deceived husband, so love’s face and the natural thing is to breathe there, after – there's a comma – Like a deceived husband, so love's face Can still seem love to me though altered new… but actually ‘husband’ sits right in the middle of the line. He doesn't do that often, but he does do it. And then there, as an interpreter of the sonnets, you get exactly into this question should I honour the line, in which case I end on ‘love's face’, which he may want to highlight by putting it at the end of the line, or by allowing the line to end on this, or should I follow my natural instinct, which is to put the comma where it would grammatically go and allow myself to breathe there? And this kind of leads me on to a question that I suppose is very strongly tied to writing in verse and writing in rhymed verse, but generally in verse, is this layering of intentions, if you like. To what extent, do you think, can we assume that absolutely everything, or the vast majority of what Shakespeare does, is entirely intentional and therefore must be honoured the way we have it delivered to us, which, bearing in mind perhaps may not be 100% authentic and may have been corrupted along the way. Or to what extent do we allow for a working writer who's very much in the dynamics of creating theatre, and of writing his incredibly complex and passionate poems, and that some of it is maybe simply just allowing for also accidents to happen? ABIGAIL ROKISON-WOODALL: Yes, absolutely. So I mean, I think there are two parts really there. So you say, to what extent can we assume that what Shakespeare does, he does deliberately. I mean, what is quite difficult even before that, as you've also hinted at, is to work out what it was that Shakespeare actually did. I guess this is easier with the sonnets, because the sonnets are seen into print during his lifetime, and we don't know what hand he might have had in that. But a lot of his plays, you know, they're not printed till after he's dead. You know, over half of his plays aren't printed till after he's dead. So he didn't have a hand in putting those together. And we don't always know where the copy for the different plays came from. So we don't know whether somebody's sort of cobbling it together from a prompt book that's got sort of scribbles and crossings out and all sorts all over it. We don't know whether, you know, some of them seem to come from authorial manuscript copy, the print behind it. And then, of course, you've got the scribe who might copy it out. You've got the compositors, the people who are responsible for putting it together in the printing house, and all of those people tinker with what they've got. Sometimes they do it deliberately, they see no punctuation, and so they add some in. But that's a problem in itself, because that punctuation might be grammatical. But, you know, the playwright might, as many modern playwrights do, have deliberately left out punctuation because they want to guide the actor in the delivery. So we can be pretty sure that what we've got is not Shakespeare's punctuation in most of his plays. We can't be sure where lots of that punctuation comes from. And then the same with lineation. I mean, Early Modern printing is so complex. I didn't realise this until I tried to do it, you know, like had a workshop at a printing press. If you think about the pages are sort of gathered together in these various… – I think you print about four sheets of paper, you put into a single gathering. So when you print it, what you're actually having to print is the front of page one and the back of page eight together on a single piece of paper, and then you're sort of working your way towards the middle of that gathering. So if you make a mistake or if you can't get a line to fit on a single line of text, and you have to kind of then overlap it onto the next line, you start to throw everything out. So at certain points, compositors have to do things, one of the things is called ‘wasting space’, where they suddenly realise that they've got to the middle and there's a load of space. So they just start randomly dividing lines all over the place, just in order to basically waste space so they don't have a massive gap in the middle of the text. And in other places, they get to the middle and realise, oh crikey, we haven't got, now, we haven't got enough space to put the stuff in and they have to start squeezing it all together. So a lot of the things that actors rely on – lineation, the way in which the text is lineated – as kind of a hint towards how it might be delivered, a lot of those things just can't be said to originate always with Shakespeare. Having said that, you know, with something like enjambment, you can be pretty sure that Shakespeare is doing that deliberately. I mean, in most cases, however the text is printed, you can tell where the iambic pentameter, where each pentameter line ends. And if Shakespeare is choosing to overlap meaning over the ends of lines, yes, we can be pretty sure he's doing that deliberately. I think what we can't be sure is whether he wants the actor to pause at the end of each line, or whether he wants the actor to run the meaning over. We can't be sure what he wants the actor to do with it, but I think we can be pretty sure that that is intentional. Otherwise, he could just… – you know, there are plenty of examples where you could just sort of shift the text slightly and it would all end up kind of being end stopped. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: And this is of course true that we know for certain how an iambic pentameter works. And so certainly with the sonnets, that edition, the Quarto Edition of 1609 is incredibly clear and clean, really. It has very few errors and they are instantly recognisable, but it hasn't really got… – I think it's got one serious, Sonnet 99 has one line too many, and we don't know why. It's the only one that has fifteen lines instead of fourteen. And then of course, there's 126, which has the last couplet missing, but it has two brackets. And so somebody has consciously decided to draw our attention to the fact that there would be two... ABIGAIL ROKISON-WOODALL: That they're missing. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: That they're missing. But Sonnet 99 is the one that has an extra line that doesn't actually disturb, you don't even notice it when you read it particularly. ABIGAIL ROKISON-WOODALL: It's difficult, isn't it? And again, you know, we can never really know whether these are, whether some of these things are errors which creep in in the printing house. You know, whether Shakespeare wrote one line, crossed it out, wrote a different line, but actually the compositor sort of doesn't see the crossing out and just prints the whole thing. Equally, sometimes we can't be sure whether a compositor misreads a spelling. I mean, Shakespeare is writing, you know, an enormous amount of work quite fast. We can't assume that his handwriting is always utterly legible. So sometimes we look at a word and we kind of think, really, really? Having said that, the eighteenth century editors sort of wanted to tidy up Shakespeare all over the place. Every time there was something irregular, they wanted to regularise it. You know, every time there was a fourteen syllable line, they assumed that an extra word had crept in by accident. And I think now we're more open to the idea that Shakespeare was playing around, and that sometimes he wanted a fourteen syllable line in there, and that it might actually be deliberate. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: And where do you stand, incidentally, because you've mentioned both lineation and punctuation, on – of course, when you take the poems, for example, the sonnets, or when you take a play as an editor, you have to make decisions. You really have to make decisions about how to punctuate. How… – not so much how to lineate, not with the sonnets. Certainly not. But how to punctuate. The Quarto Edition, for example, uses brackets a lot where we think that's quite disconcerting and they feel more like commas. So would you personally veer towards conservatism there, or do you think, actually making the text as easily accessible, if that's the right word, or as easily readable to the contemporary reader, is perfectly legitimate, so let's just mess with the punctuation because they didn't have rules for that anyway, it seems. ABIGAIL ROKISON-WOODALL: Yeah. I mean, I think it's a really I think it's incredibly tricky because part of me wants to go with the lightest available punctuation because I want to encourage actors not to fracture the verse lines too much. So particularly punctuation that isn't either at the caesura or at the end of the line, I kind of tend to think it can disrupt the way in which an actor reads it. But you've got to be terribly careful, because once you start getting rid of that, as you say, you can start to obscure meaning and you can start to introduce ambiguity into the meaning because somebody doesn't quite know which phrase connects with which phrase. I mean, there's plenty of sort of examples of this. So I think it's a really delicate balance. I think if I was publishing the sonnets for a readership, I'd probably just think use punctuation that makes them easiest to comprehend. However, if I was working with a group of actors to do a reading of the sonnets, I might choose to produce a performance text of those. And I might choose to strip out some of the punctuation in order to encourage a more kind of fluid delivery. So I think it really depends on what you're producing an edition for. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Yes, absolutely. I interestingly – a little aside to this – I am, by background a playwright. I've written a number of plays, and I, at one point, quite early on in my playwriting career, started to do away with punctuation, and instead of writing with ordinary punctuation, write everything lowercase and in lines. Just use lineation to give actors a guide towards how the text hangs together and to make sense of it. Because if you put everything just in block, then it becomes impossible to work with. And actors, in my experience, find that often a bit startling at first, but then very quickly get used to it and actually tend to like it a lot, because I've also experienced that if you give an actor a full stop, they tend to use it. Treat it as a traffic sign. They tend to stop, and so if you do away with the punctuation, you really create a new canvas on which the actor then can interpret. ABIGAIL ROKISON-WOODALL: Absolutely, I completely agree. My husband was doing a workshop – my husband's an actor, and he was doing a workshop – with a very experienced RSC director, and he came back from this workshop and I said, how was it? He said, gosh, we spent about the first kind of hour on the first line of A Midsummer Night's Dream. I thought, why? And he said, because none of us were saying it how he wanted it to sound. And I said, well, how did he want it to sound? He said he wanted it to sound: “Now, fair Hippolyta, [—] our nuptial hour draws on apace.” Well, what were you doing? Everybody kept going: “Now,[—] fair Hippolyta, [—] our nuptial hour draws on apace.” And I said, well, what edition were you using? And of course, you open the edition, and you see that because of the grammatical syntax, the editors have put commas around ‘fair Hippolyta’. So: ‘Now – comma – fair Hippolyta – comma – our nuptial hour draws on apace’. So of course all actors or, yeah, that's a generalisation, but the majority of actors looking at that will say, ‘Now, [—] fair Hippolyta, [—] our nuptial hour draws on apace’. And I think if I wanted actors to say, ‘Now, fair Hippolyta, [—] our nuptial hour draws on apace’, I’d just get rid of those commas. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Yes, I want to move on a little bit closer to the sonnets now, perhaps, maybe again as a more sort of open, broad observation on this: what do you think is the particular or are the particular challenges of working not just with iambic pentameter, but specifically with rhyme? ABIGAIL ROKISON-WOODALL: I think there are a few challenges. I mean, one of the challenges is that we don't pronounce words the same way that the Early Moderns pronounced them. So we're often faced with a choice, you know, “Blow, blow thou winter wind. | Thou art not so unkind…” – You know: do you do: ‘Blow, blow thou winter [wʌɪnd]. | Thou art not so [unkʌɪnd]’, or ‘Blow, blow thou winter [wɪnd]. | Thou art not so [unkɪnd]’. Or do you just say [wɪnd] and [kʌɪnd], and accept that they don't rhyme anymore? So I think that can be a challenge. Sometimes it's fun. I saw a production of As You Like It last night at the RSC. You know, As You Like It, there's lots of opportunity for making fun of Orlando's poetry, because sometimes, you know, he uses a word which now rhymes with Rosa[lɪnd], and sometimes he uses a word which now rhymes with Rosa[lʌɪnd]. Now, it may be that that was the case in the Early Modern period, but it may be that that's just how language has evolved. But it allows Rosalind and Celia to have a lot of fun at Orlando's expense, about how dreadful his poetry is. So I think that’s… – one of the things is where things don't rhyme anymore. I think the other thing is, it depends what type of rhyme we're talking about. So rhyming couplets, isolated rhyming couplets, I think are a gift for an actor because so often they come, they'll either come at the end of a speech or they'll come at the end of a scene, even if they, even if there's then another kind of half line after it, there's a certain sense of, ‘and now I am concluding this with my nice little finish’. And that, of course, you know, is the case with the finishing couplets in the sonnets as well, that kind of concluding couplet. And then the other thing we get are the sorts of lines where there's an, an aphorism, a kind of saying, you know, “Dead shepherd, now I find thy [saw] of might. | Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?” You know, “Thou knowst tis common, all that lives must die. | [Passing] through nature to eternity.” We get these kind of rhyming couplets, when people say some kind of pithy expression. I think they're quite fun for actors. I think much more difficult is when whole swathes of the text go into rhyme. I think that rhyming scene in Richard II, I think, is incredibly difficult for actors. There's suddenly, out of nowhere, a whole scene goes into rhyming couplets that actually, in a way, should be quite serious. It's sort of about the potential assassination of the King, and it actually makes the scene comic. Now, that may be intentional as well, but actors, I think, really struggle with that. I find that that scene can be really hugely problematic. I think in something like the sonnets, where we've got a really clear rhyme scheme, I suppose the challenge can be where rhyme and enjambment come together. I think that can be one of the biggest challenges for actors. I was talking to a playwright who writes, Ranjit Bolt, who does a lot of the translations of Molière into English, and somebody, a director had asked me to give some verse speaking advice on doing Molière. And I said to Ranjit Bolt, you know, is there anything particular you want me to pass on? And he said, 'Oh God, tell them to kind of ignore the rhyme'. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. And basically, because it's all in rhyming couplets, because it's all in rhyme, he was quite happy for the actor to sort of ignore that, and the rhyme would kind of emerge for itself. But I think you've got to be awfully skilled as an actor to ignore rhyme for it not to just sound like you don't know how to deliver a sonnet. So yes, balancing enjambment and rhyme, I think, can be very tricky. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Yes, I can certainly imagine this, particularly in theatrical performance, because with the sonnets we have more a priori reason to accept: it's stylised language and it's encapsulated thoughts, arguments, in fourteen lines or maybe twice fourteen lines, or even three times fourteen lines, but we know these are capsules of densely written language for the sake of itself. Whereas of course, in a play we have characterisation, we have this need for a degree of naturalism. Today we do. Which segues beautifully into this question of the sonnets. Well, I don't know whether many people consider it to be an important question, but I’m, as you can tell, I love these sonnets, and I am internalising them, and I think they are… – I am very much with Wordsworth, I think they offer us a key to Shakespeare's soul. I think he is relating a lot of his own personal life about himself, about where he stands in his relation to these people in his life. And so we certainly, I think, can assume that they are not written for performance as such. But what is your view, or your take on the question to what extent we may be able to assume that they were not written just for quiet contemplation, or to be read in the chamber. To what extent do they form part of a performative culture in which poetry is read out loud, is recited, is learned by heart, is effectively shared in that way? ABIGAIL ROKISON-WOODALL: I don't know, and I don't know whether we have, I'm not sure that we have any concrete evidence in the Early Modern period of, certainly not of the sonnets being performed in a way in which someone might perform them now. But yes, absolutely: we’re talking about an oral culture. We're talking about a culture where poetry is constantly read aloud. You know, right from his school days, Shakespeare would have been reading Virgil and Ovid aloud and people at home, you know, with their households would read poetry and plays. We know that, for example, Seneca's drama was read aloud, that people did kind of readings within their households. So, yes, I mean, I think it's very possible that people are reading the sonnets aloud, and I think it's equally possible that some people are buying them simply to read them, you know, to themselves. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: And also, I imagine once you have a piece of literature, whatever that may be, over the years and the decades and then the centuries, we have new ways of relating, enjoying sharing them. I often wonder how we would explain to somebody like Shakespeare or somebody like Mozart or somebody like Da Vinci, how we experience their work today, how we experience and proliferate their work today. It would be an interesting challenge to explain just what the mediums are. We have sort of touched on the way that the language has evolved, and we can assume, can we not, that language evolves further: I think we can compare recordings of the late Queen in the early part of her reign and in the late part of her reign, and they sound noticeably different. So there is a kind of a widening gap between the language of the Renaissance, the English of Shakespeare and the Renaissance and this very oral culture that depended entirely on being there in the moment in order to be heard, at least, and our culture which moves away. How do we handle this? Is there? From your perspective, do we need to start preserving Shakespeare, or is there a call for modernising him, or will it simply be the case that at one point Shakespeare will sound to a then contemporary reader the way Chaucer sounds to us. ABIGAIL ROKISON-WOODALL: Oh, gosh. I mean, there's so much in there, isn't there? I think that on the one hand, you're right, you know, language does constantly evolve. And in a way that becomes a kind of gift to us, doesn't it? I mean, I know companies who work with teenagers and will give them words from, or even lines, from hip hop or rap and lines from Shakespeare and say, which is the Shakespeare, which is the hip hop, you know. And I've done workshops where people will do that, where they'll give you a word and they'll go: Shakespeare or hip hop? And you think, well, I don't really know. I mean, I just, I know, I don't know what that word means, but I'm not sure whether it comes from Shakespeare. So that idea that we're constantly inventing language and there are constantly new words that we don't understand the meanings of, you know, that then gradually get kind of more and more embedded into the language until people know them well, that’s always going to be the case, and in some ways it helps to sort of to keep Shakespeare feeling quite contemporary in a strange way. I think the way in which, you know, language evolves. I am not, on the whole, a fan of modernising Shakespeare, but I do see that there are times when one might, as a director, want to do it. And I think... – It's difficult: when I was directing Marlowe's Edward II, there's a bit where somebody in the printed text calls somebody else a ‘mush rump’, which basically is a mushroom, and most modern edited texts change it to ‘mushroom’. And I desperately wonder, I didn't want to change it to ‘mushroom’, because calling someone a ‘mush rump’ sounds much sort of ruder and more offensive than calling someone a ‘mushroom’, in my view. I thought, it doesn't matter that we don't know what a ‘mush rump’ is now, we've got a sense that it's something to do with a mushroom. But anyway, we know it's an insult. It sounds like an insult. It's great. So sometimes I really want to stay away from it. However, I mean, one of the most notorious examples of this is in Hamlet, when Hamlet says, “I'll make a ghost of him that lets me,” when he wants to go and run after the ghost of his father, and they're all saying, stop! And he says, “I'll make a ghost of him that lets me.” Now, of course, ‘let’ now to us means ‘allow’. So it's sort of nonsense to the modern ear, what Hamlet's saying. He's saying ‘I'm going to kill you if you let me go’. Whereas actually, what he's saying is, ‘I'll kill anyone who stops me from going’. So I can't think of a recent production of Hamlet that hasn't changed that to ‘I'll make a ghost of him that stops me’, simply because it seems very confusing for a modern audience, and if there's another word that scans in pretty much exactly the same way and makes perfect sense, then, you know, fair enough. But I think it can be problematic. When I wrote the book As You Like It – Language and Writing, one of the things I was looking at was recent productions of As You Like It, and lots of them had chosen – in the UK – lots of them had chosen to change a lot of words. So, you know, ‘coney’ to ‘rabbit’, because that's what it means. ‘Tapster’ to ‘innkeeper’, because that's what it means. You know, it's a barmaid or whatever. And I think, um, yeah, okay. But when do you stop? You know, that could just go on and on until we've turned it all into modern English. I also think, ‘tapster’, I think we get the idea within the context that it's someone who, you know, does something with the beer on tap. You know, we still understand the concept of beer on tap. So I don't think that… – I'm not sure we need that translation. Last night in the As You Like It I went to see – it’s a family As You Like It, it was only an hour and a half long – and they had added in a few bits for clarity. So when Celia said something about Rosalind, she added in ‘his niece’ to reinforce the relationships, but actually at the expense of the meter. And that slightly jarred with me, but I don't know if it would have jarred with me if it wasn't for the fact that As You Like It happens to be one of those plays I know off by heart. So my brain is sort of doing As You Like It along with the company. So anything that's changed I know is going to jar for me. I think it's difficult, but I think that we probably do best just to leave the language as it is, and provided the actors understand what they're saying, I think they can probably make an audience understand what they're saying. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Yes, I personally couldn't agree more. I think there's a not so fine line between making something accessible and effectively killing the joy of the language. Because, of course, especially when we're talking about Shakespeare, who makes up words all the time, or who draws on words that are maybe then currency, but that we no longer… – But also the idea that you have to understand every single word in order to get the scene is, of course, ludicrous. We often don't understand a word, but we know what this is about and we get a feel for it. And your ‘mush rump’ example is exactly the kind of thing where, of course, we need to relish the language. And if we then start to think, oh well, but somebody might not quite get this or might wonder what this is, then shouldn't we leave that wonder in place and say, ah, this is, this could be almost anything, but I get the general gist. ABIGAIL ROKISON-WOODALL: I also appreciate that some language from the Early Modern period is now offensive to our contemporary sensibilities. And again, I think that one has to judge the situation. So I think that, you know, if members of your company find a line like, you know, “[It seems] she hangs [upon the cheek of the night] | [As a rich jewel] in an Ethiop’s ear,” if they find a line like that offensive, then by all means, cut it, you know? I mean, I don't think Shakespeare should be, I don't think we should be aiming to cause offence to audience members or to actors. But I've equally heard people argue that actually, if you keep that language in, then it opens up a conversation. It opens up a conversation about Early Modern perceptions and how those might differ from our own, and actually start to allow some of those conversations about the ways in which sensibilities have changed to take place. Whereas if you just erase them, then those conversations are shut down. So I think, again, it's about making a judgement based on who your audience are, who your company are. And I was struck last night. The actor playing Phoebe last night was an actor of colour with black hair. And of course, Phoebe has those lines, “He said [mine] eyes were black and my hair black,” as though it's the most offensive thing that anybody can say. And they didn't change those lines last night, but I thought, oh, that's interesting, because it’s… – how do you make those lines work, as Phoebe, to be outraged that Rosalind has said that your eyes are black and your hair black as an insult to you, when your eyes and your hair clearly are black or dark brown? And I know I found that difficult, as somebody who has dark brown hair and dark brown eyes, you know; as Phoebe, you know, if you do that speech as Phoebe, it's kind of difficult: you assume that Shakespeare's Phoebe is kind of blonde or red headed and is finding it deeply offensive that Rosalind has referred – or maybe mousy, you know, has kind of mousy brown hair – and Rosalind referred to their hair as black, and that's deeply offensive. So, yeah, I guess you just have to work out what you want to do with moments like that. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: But I think there two points come into play very strongly. One is the one you mentioned that we can actually have discussions and conversations about how the past was different from how we would like the future to be. And if we pretend that everything was always the way we idealise it today, then we lose the fact that we are on a trajectory. And also there is, of course, great source of humour there: that makes it doubly funny in a way. And we should maybe not lose sight also of the fact that when Shakespeare wrote the play and when it was being performed, the girl playing in front of the people would be a boy who's actually… ABIGAIL ROKISON-WOODALL: Would have been a boy. Exactly. With a ridiculous wig. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: With the girl pretending to be a boy. So all this, all this double and triple layering of identities and of cultural components, they were a source of great playfulness as well. ABIGAIL ROKISON-WOODALL: Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: I was going to ask you one more, certainly one more question. And then a sort of bonus question, which I ask all my guests. The first one is, if we are talking to an audience as I am, who are dispersed around the world and who have a great interest in the sonnets in particular, but therefore in Shakespeare generally, and if somebody – and I've had people write to me saying, ah, I've discovered the sonnets through your podcast, and I'm now reading them and I'm learning them – is there any advice that one can give somebody who's not a professional, but who's approaching Shakespeare to reading, speaking, reading out loud, or learning and speaking Shakespeare? ABIGAIL ROKISON-WOODALL: The advice I always give is to get a sense of the scansion first. I think the scansion really helps you to learn it. So if I'm, you know, if I'm trying to learn a line like “To be or not to be, that is the question.” You know, if I've scanned it and I've gone, okay, it's more or less a regular line, but it's got an extra beat on the end. If I suddenly get to ‘to be or’, and I can't think, I know it goes de-dum de-dum de.., I’ve got an idea of where it's going. So I think, I think the meter is enormously helpful in helping people to learn things. And so I think that, I think you ignore the meter at your peril, really. And I think that's particularly the case with something like the sonnets. I think if you can really get that sense of the... – get the iambic into your kind of very being that that really, really helps you when you're learning them, quite frankly. I think it also helps you because then you notice those sudden kind of irregularities that might really say something. I'm often very struck by lines that begin with a spondee or a trochee instead of an iamb. So begin with a stressed syllable. I always think that it's striking how many of Shakespeare's plays begin with stressed syllables. So, you know, “Now is the winter of our discontent…,” “O for a muse of fire…” And it grabs the attention in a way that an iamb doesn't necessarily. So I do think, I think being aware of the meter is a really, really good way both to learn verse and also to find moments in the verse where it's doing something kind of striking and interesting. What else do I do? I do those quite fun games of vowel isolation with my students a lot. So, you know, if I was doing. “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?” You know, ‘“a I o-ae ee [u] a [ah]-e ay? ...” and then, and it's basically so that you start to hear, oh all those open a sounds: a, a, a, which you don't always notice on the page, because English is such a peculiar language in the way in which we spell so many words that sound the same in such different ways. So I think sometimes that sort of exploring the vowel sounds and indeed exploring the consonant sounds out loud suddenly reveals patterns of sound, which I think can also be quite striking and quite useful to the actor. So yeah, those are a couple of things that I suggest doing. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: The bonus question that I ask everybody is not really directly related specifically to the sonnets, but it's something that fascinates me and I just wanted to know everybody's opinion on that. Which is the question of who is Shakespeare? Who was Shakespeare? What is your view on the theories that go around about who Shakespeare may have been or may not have been. Do you think that they are even worth taking seriously? Or do you, in fact, think that there are questions to be asked about the identity of William Shakespeare? Or is he the man from Stratford who we think he is? ABIGAIL ROKISON-WOODALL: I personally think he's the man from Stratford who we think he is. I mean, I think we've got enough evidence about enough things that tie together that would be very surprising if that wasn't the one and the same William Shakespeare who wrote the plays and the Sonnets. I think that so many of the things kind of tie together in terms of the records that we do have about him, his, you know, children, his marriage, his will, his purchases of houses, etcetera, etcetera. So I tend to subscribe to the idea that that's who it was. And I certainly don't buy this idea that somebody of Shakespeare's status, you know, wouldn't have travelled widely enough to have written plays that are set in different places. Shakespeare's plays do not smack to me of somebody who's necessarily travelled to those places, he writes, you know, two plays about Venice without a single canal in it. You know, it's like, you know, he writes Bohemia and Illyria with coastlines. I mean, you know, these are just, these are places. These are places, they're faraway places he's heard of and seen, you know, the island in The Tempest makes no sense. The Forest of Arden even makes no sense. I mean, you can say it's absolutely the Forest of Arden in Warwickshire. You can say it's absolutely the Forest of Ardennes in France. And, you know, all of the characters have got these French names, you know, which comes from the sources, of course, but ultimately it's a place where you've got shepherds and somebody who's, you know, looking after her goats alongside a hungry lioness. You've got an oak tree and you've got a palm tree. I mean, what sort of forest is that? You know, it's not, it's nowhere that anybody's been. These are places of the imagination. And so I absolutely will not subscribe to any of those ideas about, you know, it simply must have been the Earl of Oxford, because, you know, it must be someone who travelled more widely or who has spent time with the nobility and people in power. I don't buy that. But at the same time, I'm also not one of those people who says, I don't care at all about the person who wrote these plays and poems. You know, the kind of Death of the Author, you know, 'I don't care anything about, you know, I'm just interested in the plays and the poems themselves', because I also think, as you said earlier, that the plays and the poems are hugely revealing of the person who wrote them. I feel that we get a huge sense of Shakespeare, his preoccupations, his sensibilities through the plays and the sonnets. And I'm interested in that. I'm interested in seeing the man who wrote them through the plays and the poems. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Yes, and interestingly, in my conversation with Professor Gabriel Egan, he says that the data that we can collect through numerical and computational analysis completely refutes the ‘author is dead’ theory. He says the one thing that comes through over and over again, even in the collaborations, even in the plays that have disputed authorship, is that there are authorial voices. And even when authors, writers like Shakespeare, write for different companies, there's not so much a company style as an author... ABIGAIL ROKISON-WOODALL: Yeah, I mean, I know different, different people have slightly different takes on on that. But but I certainly felt when I was directing Marlowe and I did some work then on Marlowe's verse, and thinking about Marlowe's language and the way Marlowe uses language and uses verse in particular. And I thought this is strikingly different to Shakespeare, particularly rhyme, actually. Marlowe doesn't tend to use rhyme for aphorisms or to sum things up, he uses rhyme much more erratically, I think, than Shakespeare uses rhyme. It just felt to me like a different, felt to me like a different writer. It just doesn't feel like you're reading Shakespeare. It feels different. The style of the writing feels different. The way he uses different linguistic devices feels different. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Yes, and that's immensely telling, isn't it? Considering that they were born in the same year and part of the same, well, of an overlapping set of people. Before we go, I do also want to ask you whether there's anything else. If you think, well, if I'm going to talk to somebody about Speaking Shakespeare and we're spending an hour here and he hasn't asked me this. Why hasn't he asked me this? This is… – Is there anything else that you think are, that kind of belongs in there? I would want to make people aware of this. Or there's a thought that I have. Anything else you think that we should cover? ABIGAIL ROKISON-WOODALL: No, I think we've. I think we've covered, I think we really have covered most of the things that I think about in terms of scansion and assonance and alliteration and rhyme and enjambment and those are all the things that I think are key, actually, when you're thinking about Shakespeare's verse. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: In that case, thank you so much for joining me here on Sonnetcast. This was a real pleasure, and I love speaking about Speaking Shakespeare because to me that is what Shakespeare is really about, of course. Thank you so much, Abigail. |
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If you would like to donate, you can do so here. Thank you!